An Afternoon with a Spoon-billed Sandpiper

Happy new year everyone! 
Thought i would share some pics from the afternoon we spent at the salt pans of Pak Thale, Thailand trying to find a Spoon-billed Sandpiper with our guide before heading up north to the mountains.
We were successful but the looks were far off and i wished for a lens more substantial than the 500mm f4 and 1.4x tele combo i was using.
Someone said that the bird is easier to locate and photograph later in the season when other birds have left already, that may be true, we were happy to see it as not everyone is as lucky, especially when you only have a few hours to get it.









extreme crops of the "needle in a haystack", i realized later that a good way to spot the bird is to look for leg-banded birds.









Thanks for looking